Fiennes takes on serial killer role in new Harris movie
He has played a monster once before. Ralph Fiennes - most English of actors, slightly built with a perfect, clean- cut profile - was nothing short of chilling as the psychopathic Nazi in Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List.
Now Fiennes is again venturing down the same dark alleyways of the mind by taking the role of serial killer Francis Dolarhyde in the upcoming Red Dragon.
Created by Silence Of The Lambs author Thomas Harris, Dolarhyde, whose nickname is The Tooth Fairy, is a horrific character - a madman who determines to kill two families each full moon.
In the film, desperately trying to catch him before he kills again, is Ed Norton's FBI agent Will Graham, aided by none other than Hannibal Lecter, played by Anthony Hopkins. No wonder Fiennes thought twice about taking on a character with such extreme homicidal tendencies
Compared to even getting under the skin of a schizophrenic like Spider, in David Cronenberg's film of the same name which was premiered in Edinburgh last week and is released nationwide in January, the Silence Of The Lambs prequel was a tall order. Ralph said: "Dolarhyde in Red Dragon is very perverse indeed. It wasn't so much that I took the character home with me, but I found it exhausting to try and conjure up that way of looking at the world and people.
"Certainly, when I did Schindler's List, I took a lot of time to read up about the character. Doing Spider, I didn't see him in that same psychopathic extreme. But with Red Dragon I was wary of going down that path again.
"When you play people like Amon Goethe or Dolarhyde you have to enter into the way they see the world and the way they are emotionally disjointed and disconnected, and that is always weird and disturbing." For the actor, who turns 40 in December, Red Dragon is a big step back into working on a mainstream Hollywood film.
It has been some time since he has ventured into the mainstream arena, yet all of a sudden he has made two big- budget productions - the Lecter film followed by, another surprise, a romantic comedy next year, The Chambermaid, with Jennifer Lopez.
After the disaster that was The Avengers, Fiennes reverted most often to his first love of theatre, and went for films such as Onegin and End Of The Affair that were never destined for big box office.
With his private life causing ripples - particularly the break-up of his marriage to hospital drama ER actress Alex Kingston and his subsequent relationship with Francesca Annis, some 18 years his senior - it was as if he was avoiding the limelight.
Now he seems confident enough again to tackle a movie he considers interesting, regardless of the scale of the budget. Even so, it was a surprise he was offered the serial-killer role next to Hopkins
He added: "The Red Dragon offer really came out of the blue. I'd heard they were remaking it, because of course it's a remake of Michael Mann's Manhunter (with Scottish actor Brian Cox as Lecter), but when the script arrived I was sceptical.
"But then I read it. Ted Tally has done the script, and he wrote Silence Of The Lambs.
"It was a really good read. I couldn't stop turning the pages. I had never read Red Dragon and didn't know anything. "People who are afficianados of Thomas Harris think of Francis Dolarhyde as this huge figure, but I didn't know who he was. And then I flew out to meet Brett Ratner, this young director who had made these Charlie Chan films, who has a great energy, and I just looked at the cast.
"Anthony Hopkins, Edward Norton, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Emily Watson. Well, I thought to be alongside that quality of cast would be good - so I went for it.
"It's a well-structured genre film, I think it has more of the psychological terror of Silence Of The Lambs and less of the rather baroque quality of Hannibal."
Fiennes is quick to point out though that Red Dragon does not mean he will be turning his back on everything other than big budget movies from now on: "I'm doing a play at the National Theatre, another at the RSC and I'm talking to a lot of different people about developing scripts that aren't big budget films."
Even so, clearly the actor, who was Oscar nominated for both The English Patient and Schindler's List, is determined to stretch himself in all sorts of directions.